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I don't really disagree with the concept in the post, other than to say that it's always assuming that there's some information (observations) coming in on any
by bane 3y ago
I don't really disagree with the concept in the post, other than to say that it's always assuming that there's some information (observations) coming in on any given topic. The nuance I'm arguing for is that truly partisan news is often as much a practice of complete omission than inaccurately reported observations -- something that's....umm....omitted here, thus providing a salient example. This results in an over focus on belief networks and switching beliefs, when the result is more complex.
Many people hold no particular beliefs whatsoever on most topics. When pressed they'll generate a "belief proxy" at random until the partisan sources their mental models are fed by gives them an observation to hold to. It's perhaps not mathematical, but it's highly observable -- particularly on topics that are likely to be highly partisan.
- RationalDino 3y agoI'm focused on what we do with information we receive. I have no idea what one is supposed to do about unknown information which was not received.
- bane 3y agoAs Donald Rumsfeld famously said when working his way through the permutations in a confusion matrix: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones." Probably more actionable, https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Intelligence-Analysis-Richards-Heuer/dp/B0016OST3O https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Intelligence-Analysis-Rich...